PYSEC-2019-138
In Waitress through version 1.4.0, if a proxy server is used in front of waitress, an invalid request may be sent by an attacker that bypasses the front-end and is parsed differently by waitress leading to a potential for HTTP request smuggling. Specially crafted requests containing special whitespace characters in the Transfer-Encoding header would get parsed by Waitress as being a chunked request, but a front-end server would use the Content-Length instead as the Transfer-Encoding header is considered invalid due to containing invalid characters. If a front-end server does HTTP pipelining to a backend Waitress server this could lead to HTTP request splitting which may lead to potential cache poisoning or unexpected information disclosure. This issue is fixed in Waitress 1.4.1 through more strict HTTP field validation.
Risk Scores
Affected Products
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| PyPI | waitress | 0, 0.2, 0.3 |
Timeline
- Dec 26, 2019 CVE Published
- Nov 8, 2023 CVE Updated
- May 1, 2026 Distribution Patch
- May 1, 2026 Security Advisory
References
- https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/latest/#security-fixes url
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/GVDHR2DNKCNQ7YQXISJ45NT4IQDX3LJ7/ url
- https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LYEOTGWJZVKPRXX2HBNVIYWCX73QYPM5/ url
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-968f-66r5-5v74 advisory
- https://github.com/Pylons/waitress/commit/11d9e138125ad46e951027184b13242a3c1de017 fix
- https://github.com/github/advisory-review/pull/14604 fix
- https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2020:0720 advisory